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Reimagining Charlie Parker for the operatic stage

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    Posted: 21 Mar 2017 at 2:31pm

  Since the launch nearly five years ago of Lyric Unlimited — the community outreach, education and artistic initiative wing of Lyric Opera — Chicago audiences have been treated to mariachi operas, a children's opera and an ecology-themed opera. The aim has been to pull a younger, more diverse public into an art form many people still consider forbiddingly elitist.

Lyric Unlimited is seeking to enlarge opera's big tent still further with its latest project: jazz-infused opera.

"Charlie Parker's Yardbird," a 90-minute chamber opera based on the life of the legendary jazz saxophonist, composer, bandleader and bebop pioneer, will receive its Chicago premiere under Lyric Unlimited auspices Friday and Sunday at the Harris Theater for Music and Dance in Millennium Park.

The work, with music by Daniel Schnyder and libretto by Bridgette A. Wimberly, was written expressly for the celebrated American tenor Lawrence Brownlee, who will portray the tragically short-lived jazz artist known by his nickname Yardbird, or, simply, Bird. 

Angela Brown will portray Parker's mother, Addie, with Ryan Opera Center alumnus Will Liverman singing the role of Dizzy Gillespie, the jazz trumpeter who was Parker's closest colleague. Ryan alumna Julie Miller will portray his friend and patron, Baroness Nica. Kelly Kuo will conduct the chamber ensemble.

Born in Kansas City, Kan., Parker died in 1955 at 34 as a result of heroin addiction, alcohol abuse and a weakened heart. He left behind many unrealized ambitions and an innovative artistic blueprint that would allow other jazz greats such as Gillespie to do what he was unable to accomplish in his all-too-brief lifetime.

"The opera is not a biography — it's a meditation on Charlie Parker's life and how that resonates with what is good and not good in our lives today," said Ron Daniels, who served as both dramaturg and stage director for the show's world premiere by Opera Philadelphia, which co-commissioned it, in June 2015.

Daniels, whose directing credits include a 15-year stint with Britain's Royal Shakespeare Company and numerous opera productions, went on to stage subsequent revivals of "Charlie Parker's Yardbird" at New York's Apollo Theater, Madison Opera in Wisconsin and, now, Chicago.

The opera begins at Parker's death and jumps around in time to reveal the struggles and relationships that stoked his creative genius — including his relationships with his mother, his three wives, Gillespie and the patron, Baroness Nica, in whose apartment he died. Not by accident is the work set in Birdland, the famed New York jazz club named after Parker.

Long active as a jazz and classical saxophonist, Schnyder was a natural to drive the "Yardbird" project. The Swiss-born composer and performer, 56, is steeped in American jazz and lives in the Harlem neighborhood of New York City that was Parker's stamping grounds.

It was Schnyder whom Opera Philadelphia music director Corrado Rovaris approached about creating a vehicle for Brownlee. Various subjects and librettists were discussed, but nothing panned out.

Then Schnyder went to Lincoln Center to hear Brownlee sing a concert of gospel music. That's when he hit upon the idea of writing a Charlie Parker biopera as a vehicle for Brownlee, an internationally acclaimed bel canto specialist.

"Larry has that amazing vocal flexibility that allows him to sing very high and very low and very fast" — a skill that relates his artistry to Parker's, Schnyder said.

Once the topic had been chosen, it was then a matter of finding a librettist who would create a text that wasn't, in the composer's words, "just five jazz musicians standing around on stage talking about music."

Schnyder sounded out Wimberly, an accomplished poet and playwright who lives not far from him in Harlem. She agreed to join the creative team and set to work turning Parker's messy, turbulent life into a libretto.

It took more than three years of pruning, shaping and refining for team members to arrive at a music drama that would tell the story of Charlie Parker in a way that was at once true to history and artistically meaningful.

Capturing Parker's "many layers and subtleties" in his portrayal has been "a challenge" for Brownlee, the singer said, but one he was grateful to get.

When doing the opera was first broached to him, he thought the only thing he had in common with the jazz legend was their common identity as African-American men. Absorbing the role and living it in multiple performances have taught him otherwise, he said. The part has tapped unsuspected resources, he suggested: "As an actor and singer, you have to be fully committed to a role like this, or else it will fall flat."

Brownlee wasn't deeply familiar with Parker's music, he confessed, until he began researching his role. It was only then that he discovered the link between his classical training and Parker's jazz world was there all along — in the gospel music he sang as a young man at his family's church in Youngstown, Ohio, where he grew up.

"Gospel has a lot of free-flowing melodies improvised over the music, and that's similar to jazz," the singer said.

The fact remains, however, that different techniques are required to sing the bel canto roles that have made Brownlee world-famous and the scat-singing Schnyder's music requires of the opera's central figure.

How comfortable was Brownlee making the stylistic and musical leap from Rossini to scat?

"I tell people I didn't have the 'scat language' going into this project, but I studied the recordings of the scat masters Ella Fitzgerald and Mel Torme, and that definitely helped get me there."

Although none of Parker's music is quoted verbatim in the opera, the score incorporates reminiscences of songs the jazzman made famous. And one of the scat numbers Brownlee sings is a transcription of a sax solo the real-life Parker played in his famous 1940s recording of Dizzy Gillespie's classic "Night in Tunisia."

It's rare for a new opera to travel to as many cities, in so short a time, as "Charlie Parker's Yardbird" has done since its premiere nearly two years ago.

The opera drew packed houses in April 2016 when it played the historic Apollo Theater, where Parker himself performed during the 1940s and '50s. The same Daniels production will receive six performances in June at the English National Opera in London. Opera companies in Omaha, Neb.; Toronto; Basel, Switzerland; and Leipzig, Germany, also have expressed interest in mounting the piece, Schnyder said. The very fact that it requires a cast of only six singers and an orchestra of 16 players commends it to cost-conscious impresarios.

Schnyder said he's pleased by how well the work has developed in the course of its odyssey from Philadelphia to Chicago. "Sometimes with a new opera you just need time to get it right," he said.

At the time of the opera's premiere, Brownlee said he would not "insult (Parker's) legacy" by trying to "mimic" the jazz legend. All that performers can do, he says today, is "to bring more life and shine" on his accomplishments, and, in so doing, "make people appreciate a bit more who Charlie Parker was."

The Lyric Unlimited production of "Charlie Parker's Yardbird" will be performed at 7:30 p.m. Friday and 2 p.m. Sunday at the Harris Theater for Music and Dance, 205 E. Randolph St.; $36-$125; 312-827-5600, www.lyricopera.org.

Preceding each performance will be a 30-minute conversation by opera and jazz authorities Jesse Gram and Neil Tesser. After each performance, members of Orbert Davis' Chicago Jazz Philharmonic will perform music by Charlie Parker.

Brownlee will be joined by bass-baritone Eric Owens for a duo recital, sponsored by Lyric Opera, at 3 p.m. April 9 at the Civic Opera House, 20 N. Wacker Drive; $20-$35; 312-827-5600, www.lyricopera.org.

Sharps and flats

•The Glen Ellyn-based New Philharmonic has been named professional orchestra of the year by the Illinois Council of Orchestras in its annual awards for excellence in musical performance.

Other awards went to the Evanston Symphony, community orchestra of the year; music director Jay Friedman of the Symphony of Oak Park and River Forest, conductor of the year (community orchestra category); Chicago Youth Symphony Orchestra, programming of the year; and Lake Shore Symphony Orchestra, community relations of the year.

•The Music Institute of Chicago has named cellist Horacio Contreras to its string faculty, and pianist Winston Choi to the faculty of its Academy training program for gifted pre-college pianists and string players.

In other appointments, the DePaul University School of Music has added singers Nicole Cabell and Christopher Magiera to its vocal performance and opera faculty. They are to begin as tenure-track assistant professors this fall.

John von Rhein is a Tribune critic.

[email protected]

Twitter @jvonrhein 

from  www.orlandosentinel.com

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Edited by snobb - 21 Mar 2017 at 2:32pm
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